I just finished reading Maggie Jackson’s ‘Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the coming dark age’ as well as Susan Jacoby’s ‘The Age of American Unreason.’ These books hit a nerve of something that I was unable to articulate until now.

I have become increasingly interested in social media. By social media I mean social networking, blogging, texting (SMS), instant messaging, etc. While we have certainly seen the economic impact of these technologies, I would like to study the social and human behavioral impact of them as well.

What is your perspective on this issue? Without making a judgment value, how has all of this social media affected your life. More importantly, how has it affected your / others behavior?

Well, for me the existence of fora such as this has made it much easier to interact with people who have minority viewpoints similar to my own, and it has provided an amazing opportunity to lear from people with different backgrounds and experiences. I suppose in practical terms, I spend more time interacting than I did before such technology was available, though not any more or less in person I think. Time I might otherwise have spent reading or engaged in other individual activites is primarily what has given way to such distance socializing.

I’m not a user of much of the social media (Myspace, facebook twitter, second life, etc), probably both by temperment and as a function of my age. So no real commonts on those.

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The SkeptVet Blog
You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place.
Johnathan Swift

I have noticed a big change at work. People talk on their chats, forums (fora? ) and blogs and only seldom engage in a conversation with other colleagues. The truth is, I don’t really mind that much. Do I really need to tell everybody over and over how great my weekend was? Nah, this is more fun.

FWIW I think these are having and will have a very large impact on culture. Precisely what and how, I don’t know. It may simply be that the same cultural ideas are simply given another outlet, more immediate and current. It certainly makes contact with far flung friends orders of magnitude easier.

These forums give me an otherwise unavailable outlet to interact with people with whom I don’t have to tiptoe around religious beliefs I don’t share. It is refreshing to be able to discuss and debate and even argue with others without the 800lb gorilla of religion in the room!

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Church; where sheep congregate to worship a zombie on a stick that turns into a cracker on Sundays…

The explosion of personal opinions and information has been both a boon and a boondoggle, in my opinion. Much time is wasted in trivial communications of the ‘what are you wearing?’ variety, but the proliferation of blogs has really encouraged folks to express their opinions and engage in a public debate over those opinions and the views of others. So I say that, with a few unfortunate exceptions, social networking has been largely a positive thing.

If the blogs and Facebook et al were a worldwide phenomenon I think there would be a lot less international tension. The more we learn about other cultures the more we come to understand what really unifies us humans. Information, while sometimes dangerous, is important to fight the worldwide advance of ignorance and superstition.

Actually I find the degree of intellectual conformity even on the internet to be somewhat shocking.

A lot of people think they can browbeat others on the net, like it is supposed to bother anybody. I think our so clled educational system has created people that will give in to that crap. It can be hilarious.

But A LOT of culture is just people internalizing inaccurate thinking even when it is extremely obvious that it is incorrect. The Europe as continent is my favorite example. But people getting upset over saying that Star Wars isn’t science fiction cracks me up. So the internet isn’t going to change people as fast as I would like but it is going to make changes inevitable just because so much information will become unavoidable.

The internet may Vulcanize the planet eventually. Illogic cannot be tolerated. And not just about religion.

Social media has changed the way I live since it started. It’s the power of connectivity, I can get to be reunited with all the former acquaintances that I long don’t have a communication with. Can talk and stay connected at any hour of the day, well that’s the convenience. Only downsides with this is that I think that the social media has taken some part on my real social life. And because that I get connected with my peers online I just seldom see them in person. I also don’t go out that much to all those usual places I hang out to. It was still nice to have what you call a human touch than. And be encapsulated in virtual reality.